The corridor had gone quiet, but not empty.Silence pressed around them with the soft weight of piled blankets. Every step sounded muffled, as if the stone had learned their footfalls and was now repeating them half a breath late.
"Left bend in ten," Li隊 murmured. His knife tapped the wall twice—code they'd fallen into without deciding: move, don't speak.
They came to the bend. On the far side, the air felt different—fresher, touched by a thin vein of night. Somewhere above, a crack must have opened to the outside world. The torch flames leaned toward it like flowers chasing sun.
Zhou Zhan lifted his head, hope brightening and then caution replacing it. "There's airflow, but… the pressure's wrong. Like the passage is exhaling while the mountain inhales."
Old Yu squinted back the way they'd come. "I don't care if it's burping the wrong way. Any path that ends up not in there is a friend of mine."
Li Muye said nothing. The beat under his ribs had settled into a slow counter-tempo—his, not the tomb's. Even so, each time the distant drum found its doubled cadence, a faint pressure touched his lungs as if reminding them who had breathed first.
They reached a small antechamber—round, low, walls slick with the sheen of old polish. At first it looked like an empty room. Then the torchlight caught on something embedded in the floor: a plate of dark stone no wider than a shield, polished to a mirror's depth.
Not bronze. Not obsidian. Something older, patient as a dried riverbed.
A'Chuang stopped first. "Another gate?"
Zhou Zhan crouched, pushing his cracked glasses higher on his nose. "Not a gate. A well. A listening well."
Old Yu cracked a grin. "Great. Now the rock's an ear."
"Not an ear," Zhou Zhan said, voice hushed despite himself. "The tomb's ear."
Li Muye didn't need the name. He could feel it—the way the plate sang at the edge of hearing, tuned to the same ghost note that trembled along his veins.
"Back against the wall," Li隊 ordered. "No one stands over it. Muye, what does it want?"
"To be used," Li Muye said, surprising himself with the certainty. He lowered the torch until fire rippled across the black surface.
The mirror did not show them. It showed sky.
Not an illusion sky—real sky: the ragged peak line of the Qinling, black against a deeper black; a thread of cloud blown thin; a small, bright star shaking itself free of haze.
Zhou Zhan made a sound like a prayer. "It's… reflecting upward."
The image wobbled, then sharpened, and something else appeared—a tremble of green, quick as the glide of a moth: pine needles, wet with a drift of mist. The outside world had seeped into the tomb, as if a throat had opened between the two.
Old Yu swallowed. "If that shows the outside, what happens if someone up there looks down?"
"Don't," A'Chuang said, gaze fixed, blade at the low guard. "Don't finish that sentence."
The mirror-well brightened again. Their torchlight seemed to fall into it, as if fire had weight. The plate drank, ripples radiating outward, and the sky-image widened—stars blooming, wind threading the needles, a smear of pale light on a far ridge.
Then, faint at first and then undeniable, footsteps came from the sky.
Not close. Not near the crack. Somewhere else on the mountain—boots on scree, slow and cautious, a pause, then the scrape of weight.
Li隊's fingers tightened on the knife. "There are people up top."
"Or the tomb wants us to believe there are," A'Chuang said. He didn't blink.
Li Muye leaned closer without thinking. The mirror cooled the skin of his face, the way a basin cools the hands after a long day. He exhaled and, for a second, the starfield blurred as if the world above had fogged.
A shadow crossed the image—long, angular, wrong. Not a man. Not an animal. A mask of darkness, moving with a will that didn't belong to wind or gravity.
The tomb heard him see it. The plate hummed, a note so low it was more posture than sound, and in the reflection the shadow turned toward him as if turning toward a noise.
It had no eyes. It didn't need them. The attention hit them like cold.
"Back," Li隊 said, quiet and absolute.
They eased away. The shadow slid out of the starfield as if stepping into a room, and the mirror-well returned to plain sky, patient and innocent.
The drumbeat reached them again—two notes, a pause, two—close enough to stir dust along the floor's polished edge. The room changed with it. Hairline seams along the walls unsealed with soft clicks. Thin slivers of reflective stone slid out and angled themselves toward the well.
Zhou Zhan's pen scratched despite his hands shaking. "It's building a field—sky to mirror to us. Not just hearing. Echoing."
"Like sonar," Old Yu said, trying to make the unknown smaller by naming it. "Ping and answer."
Li Muye was still watching the sky. "Like a heart. Systole. Diastole."
A'Chuang's mouth tilted as if he might have smiled, once. "Don't let it pace you."
"I won't," Li Muye said. But even saying it, he knew the tomb had already taken that sentence apart, measured it, and filed it under useful future pressure points.
"Move," Li隊 said. "We don't camp on ears."
They skirted the room. As they passed the door, the plate brightened another shade. For a breath, the reflected sky changed again—no stars. Cloud. Then a pale smear, then a slow red arc like an ember being drawn in a circle—
"Stop," A'Chuang said.
Everyone froze.
"What?" Old Yu hissed.
A'Chuang didn't answer. He lifted his blade a fraction and angled it so the mirror's glow ran along its spine. The metal returned a ribbon of reflected light and, in that ribbon, the red arc was clearer: a seal, being inked on the sky by a hand not present. Characters older than script. A circle in thirteen strokes.
Zhou Zhan's voice was a thin thread. "It's marking… time."
The last stroke completed. The circle closed. The mirror-well went dark as a sucked-out candle.
The drum changed to a single, slow beat.
Thump.
The tomb had started counting.
Li隊 didn't let fear fill the new silence. "We keep moving. Stay on the outer ring. If it wants a ceremony, we don't attend."
They left the room. Behind them, something in the walls began to breathe a little faster
The outer ring narrowed, forcing them into single file. The murals here were different—less narrative, more instruction: sequences of glyphs arranged in spirals, each spiral crossing a narrow brass pin set into the mortar.
"Readings pins," Zhou Zhan whispered. "You can map pressure changes by—sorry. Talking to myself."
"Then think quieter," Old Yu grunted, but even he softened the words with a sideways glance. They were all wound tight. They all needed the noise of their own voices to keep the other noises out.
Li Muye ran the back of his knuckles along the stone, never touching, just letting the air between skin and mural tell him where the force lay. Runes stirred under that near-contact like fish rising under a boat.
"Two lines to your right," he told A'Chuang. "They feed the brazier ahead. Cut the intention above the flame, not the flame."
A'Chuang's blade moved without fuss, a neat stroke nowhere near metal or fire. The brazier guttered as if embarrassed to have been fooled, then pulled its thin white flame inward. Across the ring, three statues faltered mid-turn, catching a beat late, as if the orchestra had lost its conductor for a bar.
Li隊 took the moment to slide a ground pin half out with the heel of his knife, creating a slack that felt larger than it looked. The chain closest to the main sarcophagus sighed. Somewhere deeper, stone said yes to itself in a sound like chalk breaking.
"Captain," Zhou Zhan said, so softly only the back of Li隊's neck could have heard, "if we maintain this… shaving pattern, we can make the ring cough. We can shift the load off—"
"Not here," Li隊 said, just as soft. "The tomb's ears aren't always in the floor."
They reached another junction. Here the mirror-scales along the wall had shed and re-grown and shed again so many times the masonry looked molted. The new scales were smaller, brighter; each one carried a tiny, perfect reflection of their torch—so tiny that the light winked like a constellation.
Li Muye stopped. "Those are not reflecting us," he said. "They're reflecting a rhythm."
Old Yu frowned. "How can a mirror reflect a—"
And then he heard it, because the mirrors made him hear it: a pattern too soft for ears alone, thrum-thrum-thrum, nested inside the drumbeat like a second thought inside a first. Thirteen notes, then back to one.
"Countdown," Zhou Zhan said, and his hand shook so hard the pen clicked against the page. "The same thirteen from the ring and the well."
"Which ends what?" Old Yu demanded.
"Ends the part where it listens," A'Chuang said. "Begins the part where it speaks."
The air cooled at once, a crispness at the edges like winter stepping into autumn. The torches burned steady, untroubled by drafts. The tomb had stopped breathing. It was preparing to talk.
Li Muye's skin tightened. The sigil under his ribs warmed, not pain—promise.
"Positions," Li隊 said.
They formed without thinking: A'Chuang forward-right, blade slightly high; Old Yu back-left, muzzle down but brain counting targets in the dark; Zhou Zhan center-rear, notebook away now, hands free; Li Muye center-forward, palms open; Li隊 forward-left, knife a short gleam.
The mirrors around them stopped winking. Each puddled to perfect stillness. In every one, the same image formed: not their faces, not the corridor—outside. The mountaintop. The slash of the night sky. The ghost of dawn diluting black to blue.
But the view wasn't passive.
On the ridgeline, something like a hand—bled from cloud, bone-thin, thirteen-jointed—lifted and drew a circle in the air. Not fast. Patient. Making sure the line closed.
Li Muye's breath stuttered.
The hand kept drawing. When the circle sealed, it pressed its palm to its own work. The sky dimpled under the touch the way the mirror-well had.
Every mirror in the corridor answered.
The tomb spoke through the world above.
The words weren't words. They were shapes you remember with your bones: Here. Return. Begin again. The command was no louder than a thought you pretend you didn't have. But it found the parts of Li Muye that pretended nothing and touched them.
He swayed.
A'Chuang's hand closed on the back of his collar, gentle as a leash, human as a promise. "Hold."
Li Muye held. He found his low counter-tempo and clung. His next breath was his, not borrowed, and the mirrors dimmed a fraction.
Zhou Zhan's eyes filled with a wonder that looked like grief. "It can make the outside sky carry its signal," he whispered. "If anyone looks up, they'll—"
"They won't," Li隊 said. "Not tonight."
"How can you know—"
"Because tonight the sky is a drum and we are not its audience."
The hand in the mirrors put down its palm. The circle faded. The sky returned to being sky.
The corridor didn't relax.
Across the ring, the chain on the sarcophagus rolled one quiet link, metal on stone, unhurried as an old man turning over in sleep. The statues' blank faces tilted as if counting. Somewhere far below, the single slow beat ticked over to the next number.
Thump.
Li Muye's chest answered one soft note late.
A'Chuang's fingers left his collar. The man's gaze flicked once to the ceiling, then back to infinity. "We need the exit," he said, without heat. "Before the tomb forgets to let us have one."
"Noted," Li隊 said. He didn't look up either.
They moved again, faster now, like men who had decided not to be present when a thing finished becoming itself. The mirrors tried to be helpful in the way a predator is helpful when it runs alongside you to keep pace—opening small gates onto short cuts that all went somewhere you would not return from.
They ignored them.
At the last turn, the air changed again. Real air. Pine and old cold and the dusty sweetness of alpine grass crushed under rock. The outer corridor opened on a narrow fault seam no wider than Li Muye's shoulders. A pale line of dawn threaded it like water through a hairline crack.
Old Yu almost laughed. "That's what I call a recommendation."
"Quiet," Li隊 said, but there was warmth under the word. "Zhou Zhan, mark the way. A'Chuang, check the seam for teeth."
A'Chuang slid his blade into the crack and drew it back wet with nothing. "No teeth."
Li Muye took one last look over his shoulder.
The mirrors on the wall had gone dark. In the blackness, he felt—not saw—a weight of attention turn away from the corridor and down, toward the sarcophagus below. Not dismissing him. Saving him for later.
He didn't know why that felt like mercy.
They squeezed into the seam, one by one. Stone pressed close, cold and clean. The beat faded to something he could hold in his palm, like a coin he might choose to spend or swallow.
At the fissure's mouth, the mountain opened.
Black pines. Thin mist. The first gray seam of morning unpicking the eastern ridge. The world was smaller than the tomb and infinitely larger. They stepped out onto talus, knees loosening in the relief of gravity not negotiated by mirrors.
For a few breaths, no one spoke. Wind moved the needles. Somewhere lower, a bird tried out the beginning of a song and gave up.
Zhou Zhan wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand, pretending it was dust. "We made it out," he said, as if saying it could make it true for longer.
Old Yu leaned his head back and laughed once—raw, grateful, a sound with edges. "And if I never see a mirror again, it'll be too soon."
A'Chuang didn't laugh. He looked at Li Muye.
Li Muye looked back. He couldn't make himself smile. The beat under his skin was quiet, but it didn't belong to the mountain, and the mountain knew it.
Li隊 sheathed his knife. "We put distance. We eat. We plan."
He led them along the ridge, keeping below the skyline, feet finding old paths with new care. Behind them, the fissure in the rock closed a fraction, frost breathing out of it like silk. The mountain took its face back.
When they reached a shelf big enough to crouch without tumbling into history, Li隊 finally turned to them and said, "We're not done. But we're not dead. That's workable."
Old Yu dug a crushed sachet of tea out of his pocket and snorted. "I'll drink to that with pine needles and regret."
Zhou Zhan was already writing, his hand steadier the more words he put between himself and the dark. "We need a schema—mirror gates, resonance wells, surface reflections—"
"Later," Li隊 said. "First, you sleep."
Zhou Zhan paused, then obeyed, the obedience of a man who had learned which laws were older than the ones he loved.
A'Chuang settled on the edge of the shelf, knife across his knees, eyes on the line where the ridge became sky. He didn't look at Li Muye again. He didn't need to.
Li Muye sat with his back to the stone and let his head rest there. The rock was cold and sure in the way ancient things are sure. He closed his eyes.
The tomb did not fill the darkness behind his lids.
It waited.
Far below, deep under chain and bronze and a drum that remembered every hand that had struck it, something opened its mouth and learned the shape of his name.
Thump… thump-thump.
The first light touched the highest pine. The ridge exhaled.
Li Muye breathed with it, on purpose, and for a small, courageous moment the breath belonged only to him.